Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band
Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band is the eighth studio album by the British rock band, The Beatles. Released on May 26, 1967, it is often cited by critics as one of their greatest works and one of the most influential records of all time. Continuing the band's artistic maturation seen on Revolver (1966), strayed far from the conventional pop rock of the time and incorporated unusual and highly divergent elements into their music, such as Indian music, psychedelic music, music hall, and symphonic influences. It is said that this album is a response to the acclaimed Pet Sounds by The Beach Boys group released in 1966, and considered by critics as the quintessential improvement to said album.
During sessions of Sgt. Pepper's, the band managed to improve the production quality of their music, while experimenting with new recording techniques; among them, the idea by producer George Martin to include an orchestra. The album cover, widely acclaimed and imitated; It was designed by artists Peter Blake and Jann Haworth, after a drawing by Paul McCartney.
It spent 27 weeks at the top of the UK Albums Chart in the United Kingdom, and peaked at the top of the US Billboard 200, staying there for 15 weeks.
In a fundamental way, the album is the pinnacle of psychedelic rock along with Pink Floyd's The Piper at the Gates of Dawn and the genesis of what we know today as a concept album, which immediately after going on sale became a popular culture icon and a major creative and technical influence on an enormous number of artists. The album cover is considered a work of art in itself and a milestone of postmodernism. He also won four Grammy Awards in 1968, including Best Album of the Year, being the first rock album to win this award. It is one of the best-selling albums in history, with 32 million copies. estimated sales; and has also become the second best-selling album in UK history. Groundbreaking in many ways, from its structure to its recording techniques, it was added to the Library of Congress's National Recording Registry of the United States for being "culturally, historically, or aesthetically significant".
In 2003, Rolling Stone placed it at number 1 on its list of "500 Greatest Albums of All Time", while in 2020, it was placed at number 24.
In 2017 an extended remix of the album was made by George Martin's son, Giles Martín.
Background
We were fed up with being the Beatles. We really hated that fucking four little mop-top approach. We were not boys, we were men... and thought of ourselves as artists rather than just performers.
We were tired of being The Beatles. We really hated that hairstyle. mop-top immature. We were no longer boys, but men... and we saw ourselves as artists and not as simple singers. —Paul McCartney |
In 1966, The Beatles were tired of touring and the pressure of Beatlemania. During the tour of the Philippines, the group was invited by the country's first lady Imelda Marcos to a breakfast at the Malacañan Palace. The invitation was politely declined by the group's manager Brian Epstein, due to The Beatles' policy of not accepting presidential invitations. However, the presidential regime was quite offended by this rejection, so the group had to flee the country. amid riots.
Added to that, as they began their US tour in mid-1966, The Beatles were greeted by extremely annoying religious organizations, prompted by a statement by Lennon in March, in which he opined that "The Beatles were more popular than Jesus Christ", while the popularity of Christianity was declining. The hatred for The Beatles on the part of American religious sects reached the point of threatening to shoot them and also burning albums of the group outside stadiums, as Lennon would remember it:
On the night of the concert somewhere in the south (Memphis), someone set up a firecracker while we were in concert. There were threats to shoot us, and the Ku Klux Klan was burning our albums outside [...] Someone had turned on a firecracker and everyone (the members of the group) looked at each other [...] because we thought one of us had been shot. It was very nasty.
Due to the scandals experienced, at the end of the 1966 tour in the United States, on August 29, 1966, they decided to give their last official concert at Candlestick Park in San Francisco. The distance between the group and their fans it increased more and more, and Lennon would comment:
We're sick of making light music for light people, and we're also sick of playing for those people.
Even Paul McCartney, who was previously the most enthusiastic about the tour, decided that "enough was enough".
After the group's return to the United Kingdom, rumors arose that the band had decided to break up, although they were later denied by Epstein. After that, the four Beatles took a vacation of almost two months, in which each member embarked on their personal projects; in 1966 George Harrison traveled to India for six weeks to perfect his sitar playing, under the tutelage of Ravi Shankar; while McCartney and George Martin collaborated on the soundtrack for the film Honeymoon in family. Also in the same year, Lennon acted in the film How I Won the War in Almería, Spain, composing the first verses of "Strawberry Fields Forever" there. In addition, he attended various art galleries; in fact, at the Indica Gallery in London, he would meet his future wife Yoko Ono Drummer Ringo Starr used the holidays to spend more time with his wife and his first child Zak.
In November, McCartney came up with the idea of creating a fictional band to replace The Beatles, but he would translate it into a song. Months later, this song would inspire the conceptual idea of Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band. Later, when the four members met at Abbey Road Studios, they were quite clear with producer George Martin:
- Lennon: “It is very simple. We're tired of playing in public. But this gives us a new beginning, don't you see?».
- McCartney: "We can't be quiet on stage because of all those screams. We try to play live songs [of Revolver], but there is overdubs so complicated we could never do it. Now we can record what we want, we won't care how complicated it is. We want to put the very high list, and make the best album we've ever done."
- Lennon: “What we mean is that if we leave the tours, we can record music that we won’t have to play live, and that means that we can create something that no one has ever heard of, a new kind of music with new types of sounds.”
So on November 24, 1966 they set out to record the first song scheduled to be on the album, "Strawberry Fields Forever", although this was not to be, as this song would be released as a single.
Inspiration and concept
In early February 1967, McCartney would come up with the idea of recording an album depicting a concert by a fictional band. This alter ego of The Beatles would give them the freedom to experiment with their music to the limit.
McCartney would also say that:
I thought, let's stop being us. We believe an alter ego [...] we were not going to be doing all that music, we were not going to be The Beatles, would be another completely different band, so we were able to lose our identities in this.
George Martin would also weigh in on the fictional band:
The Sergeant Pepper He didn't show up until we were in the middle of the album recording.It was just a song by Paul, nothing from the other world [...] but when we finished it, Paul said, 'Why don't we do the album as if the album was finished, Banda Pepper really existed, and as if Sergeant Pepper were you doing the album?'
I loved the idea, from that moment on. Pepper He had his own life.
Aesthetically, the four Beatles also changed radically, each member completely changed their look temporarily wearing a mustache that characterized them both. Lennon lost a lot of weight and began to wear his well-known glasses in addition to changing his hairstyle to a shorter one giving it a bit of shape over time, although the truth was that he looked older and gave a radical change to his previous appearance of 1966, McCartney cut himself his hair more and he used to wear it disheveled in addition to wearing his mustache, although he also looked a little thinner than he was before, but what was most noticeable was the notorious change in his facial features, something that would later become quite a myth of Paul is dead, Harrison let his hair grow and he looked older, probably due to his addictions, he was the most influenced by Hindu culture. Starr did not change much, he simply had more disheveled hair but he also highlighted his mustache that he carried until the last days of the band. Delving into the role of the band of Sgt. Pepper's. They had grown sideburns and mustaches, and their hairstyles changed, which certainly influenced hippie culture. The classic suits they wore were replaced by psychedelic Edwardian-inspired military uniforms. According to McCartney, the band was named for "altering our identities, freeing us and having fun". Additionally, the name Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band is linked to the American tendency to give their groups "long names", such as Quicksilver Messenger Service or Big Brother and the Holding Company. McCartney's idea of Sgt. Pepper's, The Beatles decided to give their alter ego a "long name".
Plot
The album begins with the sound of an orchestra tuning its instruments, before giving way to the song "Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band", which features the band itself and its fictional leader Billy Shears (played by Ringo Starr).
The roadie Neil Aspinall suggested that this song function as the compère of the album itself.
Immediately after the opening song ends, voices chant Billy Shears' name, beginning the song "With a Little Help from My Friends," sung by the frontman himself, who answers questions posed by his own audience A reprise of the album's title track appears as the penultimate song on the album, an idea also conceived by Aspinall, as a kind of farewell song.
Without a pause, the album's so-called climax, "A Day in the Life", begins. However, the band abandoned the original concept except for the first two songs and the reprise of the first., so the plot of the album ends up becoming a framed narrative. In fact, Lennon himself acknowledged that the songs he wrote for the album have nothing to do with the concept of Sgt. Pepper's, noting that none of the other songs did, saying that "any of the other songs [on Sgt. Pepper's] could be on any other album". Despite Lennon's statements, the album has been widely noted as an early and innovative example of a concept album.
Recording
The sessions of Sgt. Pepper's began at the end of November 1966 with a series of songs that would form an album thematically united by the childhoods of the four Beatles, a concept devised by Lennon. The initial result of these recordings would become "Strawberry Fields Forever", "When I'm Sixty-Four" and "Penny Lane". A piece recorded between takes of "Penny Lane", is "Carnival of Light". It is an avant-garde sound collage lasting approximately fourteen minutes, full of samples and distorted instruments. However, "Strawberry Fields Forever" and "Penny Lane » would be released as a double A-side single in February 1967, as EMI was pressuring Martin to release new material. Once the single was released, the concept being worked on was dropped in favor of the idea of Sgt. McCartney's Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band, and following the group's usual practice, the single was not included on the LP (a decision Martin would later regret).
The first song from the album to be recorded was "When I'm Sixty-Four", an old tune from the Cavern days, on December 16, although at one point it was intended to be released as a side B for "Strawberry Fields Forever". The group would not record any songs on the album until January 19, 1967, at which time they began recording "A Day in the Life". to the album, it began to be recorded on February 1, finishing it that same day. On February 3, the group returned to work on "A Day in the Life", in a session lasting the same as the day before. Both McCartney and Starr would re-record their instruments, noting that Starr's drumming performance on this recording would later be highly recognized.
We convinced Ringo to play tom-toms [in «A Day in the Life»]. It's sensational. He usually didn't like to play as a guide drummer, so to speak, but we prepared him to do it. Then we said, 'Come on, you're amazing, this will sound really good,' and it was.Paul McCartney
The band would return to work on the album on January 8, on "Good Morning, Good Morning", the first Lennon composition to be recorded. On the day after, another new song would be recorded: "Fixing a Hole". ». It is worth noting the particularity that this recording session was the first to be done in facilities other than Abbey Road Studios, being replaced on this occasion by Regent Sound Studios. On February 10, one of the most significant sessions would take place, the day they resumed «A Day in the Life», and recording in this session, the orchestra that fills in the twenty-four bars. The cost of this session would be 364 pounds sterling and 10 shillings, somewhat excessive for the time (5,640 pounds sterling in 2014). To add to the extravagance, the group asked the members of the orchestra to wear some costume along with their formal suits. Martin would recall: "I left the studio at one o'clock and came back to find one of the musicians, David McCallum (the father of the actor of the same name) wearing a clown nose; and Erich Gruenberg, the lead violinist, wearing a gorilla paw in his right hand. They were all wearing funny hats and party favors. I just sat back and laughed!"
On February 13 and 14, "Only a Northern Song" is recorded, a composition by Harrison. However, Harrison himself decided to put it aside to record another song (although it would still be picked up on April 20). On February 17 and 20, the first of several sessions for "Being for the Benefit of Mr. Kite!". Martin wanted to add calliopes and steam organs, to give the song an authentic circus sound, however none of the required instruments could be found. Because of this, the group searched for tapes that would be of use. in the EMI library. In this way, ribbons were extracted from some calliopes, they were cut and arranged randomly, and finally they were collected or put on the reverse. However, although nineteen soundbites were stitched together, they would not be added to the song for several days.
By the end of February, two new songs, "Lovely Rita", and "Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds" were to be recorded. During March, the songs "Getting Better", "She's Leaving Home" were recorded », «Within You Without You», using several Indian musicians in the latter. In addition, other songs already recorded were polished, while by the end of the month, "With a Little Help from My Friends" was recorded. The reprise of the song that opens the album, was recorded on April 1 and 20 in two separate sessions, separated by a short break during which McCartney traveled to the United States. The album was finished on April 21, the day in which the joke that appears at the end of the album was recorded in one long, messy session. Geoff Emerick, EMI's sound engineer, estimates that 700 hours were spent recording the LP, more than 30 times the length of the album. time spent on the Beatles' first album, Please Please Me. The final cost of the recording was approximately £25,000 (over £46,000 today).
Instrumentation and effects
McCartney has consistently asserted that the great influence on the performance—whether instrumental or technical—of Sgt. Pepper's was the album Pet Sounds by The Beach Boys. Emerick observed that Pet Sounds was played constantly in the Beatles studio by what he and the other members of the production were able to capture the sound that the group wanted to achieve. In addition, it led McCartney to develop a new style of playing the bass, focused on the melody and not on the rhythm, a style that would prevail in many of his later recordings. George Martin also claimed that "without Pet Sounds, Sgt. Pepper's would not have existed [...] Pepper was an attempt to match Pet Sounds".
As EMI's most successful artists, and one of the most popular bands at the time, The Beatles had almost unlimited access to the technology at Abbey Road Studios. All of Sgt. Pepper's, along with other songs would be recorded and released in monaural and stereophonic sound, using a four-track recorder. As on their previous albums, Sgt. Pepper's was recorded using a technique called "mixdown", in which songs were recorded on a four-track recorder, then mixed down for inclusion on one of the four tracks. from a second master recorder. This allowed the sound engineers to give the group more freedom to record their increasingly complex songs.
From the days of RevolverWe were always asked to do the impossible, so we knew that the word “no” did not exist in the Beatles’ vocabulary.Geoff Emerick
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A fundamental part in the technical context of Sgt. Pepper's is the abundant use by Martin and his engineers of signal processing in the making of the recordings, among which can be found sound compression, reverberation, and sound limiters. Several innovative recording techniques were also used, such as direct injection (which consists of connecting an instrument directly to a recording console), and varispeed (used to vary the speed of a recording in order to modify the height). It was created in 1966 by one of the sound engineers, Ken Townsend, at the request of the Beatles, especially Lennon, who hated having to record his voice twice. The ADT would quickly become popular in the musical world. Another technique used on the album is called pitch shifting, and it involves recording different tracks with slight speed changes on a multitrack recorder. It was widely used on his vocals in that period and would be used in parts of the rhythm tracks of Sgt. Pepper's—as in "Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds", where the track changes from 49 cycles per second to 45—giving them a thicker, more diffuse sound. Relatively recent modular effects were also used, such as vocals and instruments played through a Leslie speaker.
The UK launch of Sgt. Pepper's was the first pop album without the characteristic silences that separated the songs from the others. The songs are practically linked together, giving the impression of a continuous live performance. makes use of various keyboard instruments. McCartney plays a grand piano on "A Day in the Life", and a Lowrey organ on "Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds". While Martin plays a pianet (a kind of electromechanical piano) on "Getting Better", a harpsichord on "Fixing a Hole" and a harmonium on "Being for the Benefit of Mr. Kite!". In the same last song, Lennon does his thing on a Hammond organ.
Packaging
Cover Page
The cover of Sgt. Pepper would be designed by British pop artists Peter Blake and Jann Haworth. Regarding its conception, Blake would say: "I offered the idea that if they were to just play a concert in the park, the cover could be a photograph of the group right after the concert with the audience that had just seen the concert, looking at them». Adding that, "if we did this using cardboard cutouts, it could be a magical audience of whoever they wanted". According to McCartney, he himself would have given the sketch that Blake and Haworth based the design on. The cover would be photographed. by Michael Cooper, with art direction by Robert Fraser.
The cover features a colorful collage of the Beatles dressed as Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band, posing in front of a group of life-size cardboard cutouts of famous people. The Beatles each sport a prominent mustache, this after Harrison grew one as a disguise during his visit to India. The mustaches reflect the gradual influence of the hippie movement on clothing., while the group's costumes, in Gould's words, "parodied the fashion for military dress in Britain".
The musicians' wardrobe was created by the English design house Berman. Famous faces included Marilyn Monroe, Marlon Brando, Mae West, Charles Chaplin, Albert Einstein, Edgar Allan Poe, Aleister Crowley, Bob Dylan, Oscar Wilde, Karl Marx, D.H. Lawrence and even Shirley Temple. In addition, in one corner you can see a doll with a wool sweater with the sentence "Welcome to The Rolling Stones", referring to the English band formed by Mick Jagger and Keith Richards.
Reception
Contemporary
The release of Sgt. Pepper coincided with a period where, with the advent of dedicated rock journalism, critics sought to acknowledge the artistry in pop music, particularly the works of the Beatles, and to identify the album as a refined artistic statement. In the United States, this search would increase with the release of the single "Strawberry Fields Forever"/"Penny Lane", and would be exemplified by Leonard Bernstein's television show Inside Pop: The Rock Revolution., broadcast on CBS in April 1967. Following the release of The Beatles' single, in the words of author Bernard Gendron, a "discursive madness" occurred when Time, Newsweek and other cultural mainstream publications exponentially gave their "ecstatic approval to the Beatles".
The vast majority of contemporary reviews of Sgt. Pepper were positive, with the album receiving wide critical acclaim. According to Schaffner, this consensus would be correctly summed up by Tom Phillips in The Village Voice, when he called the record "the most ambitious and most successful album ever released". Among the UK pop press, Peter Jones of Record Mirror would describe the album as "witty and brilliant, from raucous to soulful and vice versa", while the Reviewer for Disc and Music Echo would call it "a beautiful and powerful record, unique, witty, and impressive".
Retrospective
Although few journalists initially agreed with Richard Goldstein's criticism of the album, many of them would come to appreciate his views in the early 1980s. In his 1979 book Stranded: Rock and Roll for a Desert Island, Greil Marcus would describe Sgt. Pepper as "playful but contrived" and "a grave Day-Glo for its time". Declaring the album "chokes on its own vanity" while "justifying itself by being globally acclaimed". Lester Bangs — dubbed the grandfather of punk rock journalism—would write in 1981 that "Goldstein was right in his much-despised review [...] predicting that this recording had the power to almost itself destroy rock and roll." ». He would also add that: «in the sixties rock and roll began to think of itself as an "art form". Rock and roll is not an “art form”; rock and roll is a raw scream from the bottom of the gut."
In 1976, for an article in The Village Voice, Christgau would review the "alleged momentous artworks" of the year 1967, mentioning that Sgt. Pepper seemed "tied to a moment" amid that year's culturally important music that had "aged in a sense that it speaks with unusually specific eloquence to a single point in history." Of the "certainly a dozen good songs" Christgau expressed that: "they are very precisely executed though, but I won't complain".
Song List
All songs written and composed by Lennon-McCartney, except "Within You Without You" by George Harrison. Song lengths and lead vocals according to Mark Lewisohn and Ian MacDonald.
| Face one | ||||||||||
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| N.o | Title | Principal speaker | Duration | |||||||
| 1. | «Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band» | McCartney | 2:00 | |||||||
| 2. | «With a Little Help from My Friends» | Ringo Starr | 2:42 | |||||||
| 3. | «Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds» | Lennon | 3:28 | |||||||
| 4. | "Getting Better" | McCartney with Lennon | 2:48 | |||||||
| 5. | «Fixing a Hole» | McCartney | 2:36 | |||||||
| 6. | «She's Leaving Home» | McCartney with Lennon | 3:25 | |||||||
| 7. | «Being for the Benefit of Mr. Kite!» | Lennon | 2:37 | |||||||
| 19:34 | ||||||||||
| Cara dos | ||||||||||
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| N.o | Title | Principal speaker | Duration | |||||||
| 1. | «Within You Without You» | Harrison | 5:05 | |||||||
| 2. | «When I'm Sixty-Four» | McCartney | 2:37 | |||||||
| 3. | «Lovely Rita» | McCartney | 2:42 | |||||||
| 4. | «Good Morning Good Morning» | Lennon | 2:42 | |||||||
| 5. | «Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band (Reprise)» | Lennon, McCartney, Harrison and Starr | 1:18 | |||||||
| 6. | «A Day in the Life» | Lennon with McCartney | 5:38 | |||||||
| 20:02 | ||||||||||
Staff
- Additional muscles
- Neil Aspinall: harmonic (Being For The Benefit Of Mr. Kite) and tanpura (Within You, Without You)
- Mal Evans: harmonic (Being For The Benefit Of Mr. Kite); countdown, alarm clock and final chord My on piano (A Day In The Life)
- Matthew Deyell: Pandereta
- George Martin: clavecín (Fixing A Hole); organ Hammond, armon, glockenspiel, organ Lowrey and organ Wurlitzer (Being For The Benefit Of Mr Kite), piano, final chord Mi en armón (A Day In The Life)
- French quartet: with arrangements and orchestral direction by George Martin and Paul McCartney (in "Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band")
- String and harp section: with arrangements by Mike Leander and orchestral direction by George Martin (in "She's Leaving Home")
- Harmony, table, sitar, dilruba, eight violins and four cellolos: with arrangements and orchestral direction by George Harrison and George Martin (in "Within You Without You")
- Threesome of two clarinets and a low clarinet: with arrangements and orchestral direction by George Martin and Paul McCartney (in "When I'm Sixty-Four")
- Three saxophones, trombone duo, French corn: with arrangements and orchestral direction by John Lennon and Paul McCartney (in "Good Morning Good Morning")
- Orchestra of 40 musicians (bodies, wind-metal, wind-madera and percussion): with arrangements by George Martin, John Lennon and Paul McCartney; and orchestral direction by George Martin and Paul McCartney (in "A Day in the Life")
Position in the charts
| Country | List (1967) | Highest position | Weeks at the 1st. |
|---|---|---|---|
.svg){kind=small} United Kingdom | Record Retailer | ||
| New Musical Express | |||
| Melody Maker | |||
 United States | Billboard | ||
| Record World | |||
| Cash Box |
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